^Woah! I remember a bit about the Spenser For Hire series. The new film seems so different I didn't even connect the two. It does look like an exceedingly typical actioner.
With Netflix hiking their prices (meanwhile other services are snapping up better and better content and charging less) I decided to end my membership. So I'm watching a few of their Originals this month before membership expires. First up:
Altered Carbon Season 2 (2020)
Ugh. Okay, so I was already wary about this since I loved Joel Kinnaman in the first season and I knew he wasn't coming back. I tried to keep an open mind, though. But literally every single aspect of the series is a big drop from Season 1. For those who don't know, S1 was a neo-noir sci-fi detective mystery with an aesthetic strongly inspired by Blade Runner. Add in a wealth of heady concepts, heaps of sex and nudity, and a healthy amount of visceral ultra-violence, and it made for one of the best seasons of TV I've ever seen. Kinnaman played "Takeshi Kovacs", an Asian special ops agent with 100s of years of experience in a future where his essence has essentially been downloaded into a new body: this tall, lethal Swedish brick shithouse. We follow Kinnaman's hardboiled detective for most of the season, later flashing back more to his backstory where he's played by ethnic Korean Will Yun Lee. They're meant to be the same person, and though Lee's Kovacs is technically the original, we don't see him all that much so I forgave that Kinnaman's Kovacs doesn't seem to act particularly identical.
In S2 however, Kovacs is recast again in Anthony Mackie's body, and we see more of Lee as well. There are actual several body-swapping scenes where you'd expect to see different mannerisms and behavior from Mackie, but we get none of that. He's just Anthony Mackie. We don't get any of the hardboiled detective vibe either, from his performance or the show in general. The Blade Runner-esque streetscapes give way to a more generic sci-fi futurism for much of the show. The nudity and ultra-violence is dialed
way, way back. The fight scenes especially are disappointing. Kinnaman tried several different martial arts for the show, eventually becoming a daily practitioner of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. That meant that there were glorious closeups of Kinnaman pulling off titanic chest kicks or holds, whereas every fight scene has to take place in incredibly dark places here, where they hope the audience won't notice Mackie isn't fighting and it's almost all stunt doubles (we noticed.)
In S1, the story mostly kept to the books (which I never read) although apparently with 2 changes. One of them was a stroke of genius: adding Kovacs sister into the series. The other was the weakest part of the series: a whole backstory of Kovacs falling in love with this scientist-terrorist figure. Unfortunately, S2 focuses almost entirely on this second part and draws little from the novels apparently. They also lost the great creative team of writers and directors from the first show, except for one of the co-showrunners who acts as executive producer here. Instead, the new showrunner is Alison Schapker, known for cheesy network TV. And boy does this feel like it. S1 had so many fresh surprises and interesting ideas. S2 is chock full of tropes and coattail-riding, with too many "seen it better somewhere else" story elements to repeat here. There's a huge push to add in lots of actors of color and women...great. But honestly their performances aren't that great. They don't hold a candle to Dichen Lachman and Martha Higareda from S1. The story is shorter, too, and appears to have a smaller budget. It's just depressing all around. If you watched this season first, maybe it'd seem pretty good, but as a follow-up it's such a letdown.
Marriage Story (2019)
Noah Baumbach gets to cast himself as a 6'2" ex-marine who can get up and impromptu belt out Sondheim to a stunned bar and is also a "brilliant, genius" theatre director. I'm sure Adam Driver's "Charlie" would be a lot less reasonable and sympathetic in this story if Baumbach's ex-wife was the writer. Fantasy aside, if you can get past some incredibly stagey and transparent writing by Baumbach (his Woody Allen crush is always grating to me) then the performances here are riveting. Full thoughts:
https://letterboxd.com/nottheacademy/film/marriage-story-2019/